


Realign

by astxrwar



Series: Soulmate Verse [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, F/M, Mutant Powers, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 07:23:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18494137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astxrwar/pseuds/astxrwar
Summary: "I wouldn't have chosen you. This. If I-- if I had a choice, I mean," you say, holding back a visceral, full-body flinch at how fragile your voice sounds. "I just-- you deserve to know that."And--You know the science, you know that you can't, by any logical means, actually feel any of your soulmate's emotions, but you imagine for a second that your own mark burns with a bittersweet combination of sadness and acceptance.[OR: Pietro is what you're stuck with, and you don't like it, at first. That changes.]





	Realign

The mark on the back of your neck is small. A single bullet right at the base, gleaming, almost _glowing,_ a starkly vibrant ,gleaming silver against the rest of your skin.

You don’t know what it means. Not at first. And then one day you _do,_ and somehow that's worse.

 

* * *

 

His name is Pietro Maximoff and you hate him on principle.

He’s violent, he's an asshole, and he’s _stupid—_ because you have to be fucking stupid to believe that a giant goddamn _tantrum-robot_ created by _Tony Stark_ of all people could somehow, _magically,_ fix all of your problems-- and he got Clint shot, and he dislocated your shoulder, and basically ruined _everything,_ so.

So you don’t _care._

And then he takes minigun fire for Clint during the battle at Sokovia and chokes out some joke about _bet you didn’t see that coming_ and you feel a passing flicker of regret that he had to die, because contrary to popular belief you do have, you know, a conscience, and—

That’s when you see it.

There’s an hourglass mark at the base of his neck, split in half by a pink, waxy scar, and you can _feel_ your stomach drop, icy prickles of shock ricocheting down the back of your spine strong enough to make your heart stutter and grind to a silent, suffocating stop. A part of you, a not-quite-logical not-quite-conscious part of you, recognizes your mark almost immediately.

It’s him. Of course it is. Your soulmate--the silver bullet. The _quicksilver_ bullet. It _fits._ Suddenly, your mark sears, the skin at the base of your neck coming alive and burning with a ferocity that almost surprises you.

Pietro Maximoff is your soulmate. 

Pietro Maximoff is _dead._ This is wrong. Something must be wrong.

“No,” you mutter softly, “No, no, _no—_ I don’t— I don’t _need_ this. Not now, not— _fuck.”_

It’s not supposed to be like this, you think frantically. Your soulmate is supposed to be a _gift,_ or at least a marginally good thing, and Maximoff isn’t even a good _person._ It was supposed to be special and all you get is another disappointment, another disaster _,_ another weakness to be used and exploited.

This isn’t _fair._

Maximoff is dead and your heart _aches_ and bile rises sour and brittle in the back of your throat and a tiny, hateful part of you wants to leave him there. He’s _killed people._ Innocent people. He’s half the reason you’re in this mess to begin with. And now that the battle is almost over, you reason that it’s not worth it.

_Fuck._

You can’t just—

“Clint,” you manage to choke out— he’s standing and staring down at Pietro’s dead and bullet-riddled body like he can’t quite believe what’s happened yet. “Clint, I need you to cover me.”

He wrenches his eyes away and up to you, tilts his head, the question he wants to ask written plainly on the lines of his face. He doesn’t ask. Thank god. You like that about him-- he _never_ asks.

“I got you,” he says softly, eyes flickering between you and Pietro’s sad, still corpse, notching an arrow into his bow. “Do what you gotta do, kid. Be careful.”

“I will,” you answer, closing your eyes.

When the world comes to a standstill, you feel it in your stomach, like the strain of working against the tide, a tightness that tugs and claws at your muscles in your abdomen, your entire body coming apart at the seams, unstitching every cell piece by piece.

You open your eyes you fixate on the bloodstained hourglass. Nobody’s moving, nobody’s speaking, nobody’s _breathing,_ and the pain of holding this tiny section of the universe still is almost overwhelming. It takes a lot from you to stop time like this.

It takes even more to make it go backwards, but somehow, _impossibly,_ you manage.

You always do.

 

* * *

 

You wake up in a makeshift hospital bed in Stark Tower a week and a half later with no knowledge of how you got there. Clint is standing in the corner, leaned up against the wall, a perfect picture of nonchalance. You want to laugh, but your throat is dry and you're tired and you don't think you could have managed it anyways.

"Hey," he says, walking towards your flimsy, narrow cot. "How are you feeling, kid?"

You clear your throat and sit up in the bed and squint your eyes, wondering why the ceiling light overhead is so _bright._  A sudden wave of nausea hits you square in the abdomen and your already shitty vision goes fuzzy and yellow at the edges, the bitter taste of bile surging up in the back of your mouth.

“Fuck,” you groan, slumping back against the pillows. “I feel like shit."

Clint moves closer, and you register his mouth slanting into a crooked semblance of a grin, only because it's the only thing in your vision that's in focus. He reaches out, presses the back of his hand briefly against your forehead. "Fever's gone," he says, "And you're awake now, so that's definitely an improvement."

"Not if I have to deal with you, it's not," you quip back, your answering smile weak and watery as you try-- and fail-- to leverage yourself into a more upright position with one arm. There's an untouched meal tray attached to your bed, and you pull it towards you, examining the untouched food-- steak, a slightly wilted assortment of mixed vegetables, and an untouched cup of cherry jello. "What the fuck happened?"

Clint’s smile fades almost immediately, expression going-- well, not quite stony, but close. Closed off, flat and hard and oddly unreadable. Your gut twists with a sudden lurching pang of anxiety-- this has happened before, of course, there have been other situations that have required you to use your powers, but something about his reaction tells you this time must have been different.

"You don't..." he drums his fingers against the railing of the hospital bed, nails clicking against the hard gray plastic. "You don't remember?"

You scoop up some of the vegetables with a plastic spoon, staring at them with an unnecessary level of intensity, before forcing yourself to eat them, powering past the nausea hovering somewhere in your periphery. Now that you're awake, the sickness will fade in a day or two, and your memory will come back with time, but something about the situation and the way Clint is looking at you seems strange enough to make you not want to wait. "No," you say, measuring the words carefully. "I remember, uh--Ultron. Then-- Cap and Tony having that, like, weird bullshit fight-y thing, and going to Sokovia, but..." you trail off, shrugging, trying to look more relaxed than you feel. "Everything after that is kind of a blank."

"You've been out for almost two weeks, (Name)." The words are almost whispered, but they're still oddly loud, echoing around the too-clean expanse of the room. You're immediately not sure how to respond to that-- there's no precedent, because the longest you've ever been knocked out was, what, two days? Three days? Maybe four, the time that you had to reverse a particularly stupid mistake Tony had made in the lab that had resulted in him getting one and two thirds of his fingers blown off, but-- for you to be unconscious for two fucking weeks was unheard of. Unnatural. 

This is how it works, you know that. To change time, to _really_ change time, not to divert the course of it or to find an alternate timeline or to use fancy quantum physics to fuck with reality, but to go back and erase and rewrite something that has already happened-- it takes effort. The universe expects something in return, and usually the source of that is your own body, drawing from the energy that keeps the atoms of your body locked in place. Functioning. _Alive._ So changing time requires you to make yourself violently ill, and the more severe the change, the more severe the time sickness. Basic laws of equivalent exchange.

But--

Two fucking weeks?

"What?" you say weakly. "Wh-- What did I _do_?"

Clint grimaces, taking a second to pull one of the hard-backed blue plastic chairs up to the side of the cot; the legs scrape harshly against the waxed linoleum tile. He sits down and rests his elbows on his knees, fixing you with a strangely contemplative expression. "Do you remember Pietro?"

You frown, mild irritation pinching your eyebrows together. In front of you, the meal you'd been trying to eat looks a whole lot less appetizing, and you push it away. There's a brief prickling sensation at the back of your neck, a thumbtack-sharp thorn of pressure, of _awareness,_ scraping down your spine. You decide it's not important enough to pay attention to. "Uh, yeah, Mr. _-didn't-see-that-coming_ asshole war criminal?"

Clint barks out a laugh, leaning back in the chair. A beat of silence passes, the quiet not exactly tense, but not really comfortable, either. "You saved his life," he says, mouth quirking up a little at the corners. "He saved my life-- he _died_ for me, the kid took something like fifteen bullets and you-- you brought him back."

You inhale. Open your mouth. Close it again. Finally, you say, again, "Okay, _why?_ Like, don't get me wrong, I would never want anybody to die, but..."

"But you'd never tried bringing somebody back before, I know," Clint finishes the sentence for you, still offering you that sort of half smile. You get the feeling that he knows something important about this situation that he hasn't shared with you yet, and the knowledge is irritating, to say the least.

"So why the fuck did I try, then?" you say, impatient, at the same time that Clint says, "He's your soulmate."

Your stomach _drops._

"He's my _what?"_ you say, louder than you'd expected to, followed immediately by "What the _fuck!"_

Clint holds up his hands. "Don't shoot the messenger," he says. 

You don't respond. The memories are coming back in fragments, shattered pieces of events flashing in front of your eyes, scattered and scrambled and out of order. You remember watching him fall, and you remember looking at something at the base of his neck, something that had made your gut wrench and your heart stop and your life rearrange--

It was an hourglass. 

It seems almost too simple. Too _perfect._ And it would be perfect, you think bitterly, if it was anyone other than him.

"The kid hasn't left your side," Clint says. You're only half listening, not really paying attention to the words he's saying or what they mean. "He's been waiting since you were brought here-- he's outside right now, I can bring him in if you want."

"Don't."

Clint sighs. Out of the corner of your eye you can see him drag his fingers through his hair. "Listen. I don't want to tell you what to do with your life--"

"But you want to tell me what to do with my life," you retort, fixing him with an icy glare. "He's not a good person. Actually, I think he's kind of a bad person, Clint, and I don't want--" your voice cracks, then, on the final word, and you let yourself fall into silence. He'll know what you were going to say anyways.

"Look." He leans closer, expression turned suddenly, earnestly serious, "All I'm saying is give him a chance, okay? A bad past doesn't mean jack shit, I mean-- look at me and Nat."

You hesitate, then-- because he's right, isn't he? If anyone had a terrible past it was Natasha, and everyone had forgiven her, but that was for a _reason._ "She didn't have a choice."

"I don't think this kid really did either, sweetheart."

You fix him with a frank, cold stare, and open your mouth to say something cutting and vaguely mean-spirited, but fall short for reasons you can't put words to. 

"Do you want me to bring him in?" Clint asks, softer this time.

"Yeah," you hear yourself say, quiet and dazed and _lost._ Distantly, you register the sound of his chair scraping back, and the soft clack of footsteps on the tile floor. The door opens. There's the sound of Clint speaking, his words unintelligible, and the rougher, sweeter sound of another voice, smooth and soft, heavy with an accent that you recognize. A spark of recognition-- of _anticipation--_ flickers to life in your chest, and you squash it immediately, refusing to admit to yourself that it had even existed in the first place as the door pushes open again.

The first time you look at him-- really look at him, on purpose, with intent-- he looks like _shit._ His hair is white and his skin is whiter and there are bruise-dark circles under his eyes, sharp and stark against his otherwise perfect skin, there's a smattering of coarse, dark brown stubble along the curve of his jaw. 

He's-- handsome, you suppose, in a rougeish sort of way. He's standing like he doesn't know what to do with his own body,  fingers tap-tap-tapping an unidentifiable rhythm against his side, so quickly that the movement is just a blur. A flash. 

"Hello," he says, and his voice cracks, splintering, going hoarse enough that he has to clear his throat and start over. You register your heart beating fast and then faster and a strange, surreptitious warmth suffusing your stomach-- and it feels exactly like how every shitty rom-com says it would, feels like finding something that you hadn't really been aware was missing.

You hate it and you want to strip this feeling out and throw it down the fucking _drain._

Pietro looks at you, a not-quite-smile twitching at his lips, empty and kind of sad, and raises his hand to tap two fingers against the back of his neck where you know your mark must be as if to say _I'm yours,._ Suddenly, you feel nauseous again.

Clint steps out, shuts the door behind him, and Pietro takes a step towards your bed. You tense up, not on purpose, the reaction so instinctive that you can't help it. His eyes track the movement, cataloging the sudden defensiveness in your posture.

"You don't trust me," he says, blinking slowly. 

"No," you reply, because it's the truth. "I don't trust you. I wouldn't--" you swallow past a sudden lump in your throat, an emotion that you don't want to or can't name crushing the words in your throat. "You hurt my friends. You nearly got Clint killed."

He doesn't say anything to that-- doesn't even really react, either, just sort of closes his eyes and gives you one brief nod. "You saved my life," he says, when he opens them again.

You leverage yourself into a more upright sitting position with a shallow groan; even that much effort takes a toll on your body. Pietro makes like he's going to take another step forwards, but the action is aborted, like he'd thought better of it halfway through the movement. 

"Do you want me to go?" he says, when you say nothing. 

You consider it, for a second-- you really do-- but you can't bring yourself to tell him to leave. A part of you doesn't want him to go-- a part of you that was specifically made for this. For him. It had to mean something, you rationalized, that you had his mark, that he had yours. There had to be something salvageable about this. 

"No," you say softly.

Pietro smiles at that-- just a little-- and it's imperfect and soft and the slightest bit crooked and the sight of it hits you like a sucker-punch to the gut.

You really wish that it didn't.

 

* * *

 

It's an inauspicious not-beginning to the relationship you'd rather not have.

But fate isn't something escapable, and it's certainly not something you intend to spend any amount of time running from, so--

You decide that it'd be easier just to give in, which, contrary to popular belief, isn't the same thing as giving up. 

Pietro, though--

Pietro is a fucking _conundrum._

He pulls off the bleach-blond hair irritatingly well, is just muscular enough beneath his fucking stupid skin-tight Nike athletics collection that it's attractive instead of off-putting. He had gotten himself, at some point, a fucking tongue stud. A swathe of dark brown stubble dots the squared-off curve of his jaw, a fucking perpetual five-o-clock shadow scruff no matter how often he shaves.

He's _attractive_ , unfortunately, is what you're saying. He looks perpetually like a knock-off Abercrombie extra, is what you're saying.

You learn about him-- about who he is-- in fragments.

"I have never seen a city like New York before," he starts, poking the tongs of his fork into the warm, flaky edge of his _kolaczki,_ a sort of sweet cream-cheese cookie; he'd brought you to a quaint eastern-european pastry shop somewhere near the 10-block of East Village the day you were officially allowed to leave Stark Tower. You get the feeling that it reminds him of before, and you realize with a pang that he must be homesick.

"Never?" you ask, drumming your fingers idly against the edge of the chipped, checker-painted patio table. "Cities in Sokovia, they're not like this?"

You try to ignore how stilted and stammered and _wrong_ the words sound, as you struggle to find some sort of common ground, but some part of you still vaguely resents him. _Dislikes_ him, even. You get the feeling he can tell.

Pietro huffs out a sound that might have been a laugh. "They are rubble, mostly," he admits, brushing the fringe of his hair out of his eyes and staring somewhat wistfully out into the bustle of the city streets. "War tore up my city when I was very young."

You shake your head, stirring your too-sweet butterscotch latte with the straw, ice clinking up against the side of the glass, mixing with the sugar-syrup and bitter espresso. "I-- I don't know if I'm supposed to pity you, or..." you say finally, and you have to swallow more than once in the silence to get your tongue to unstick from the roof of your mouth; by the time it does the rest of the sentence has either dried up or just disappeared somewhere in your throat.

Pietro shrugs like he'd expected it. When he speaks, his voice is softer, like he's confessing a secret. "I don't need pity." He drums an unidentifiable too-fast pattern against the back of his neck-- it's a habit, you've noticed, that you both touch your respective marks much more often. "You know what I mean," he says, after a long, tense silence.

 

He pokes again at his rapidly-cooling _kolaczki--_ the word had rolled off of his tongue when he'd ordered it, had sounded so natural, so _easy,_ and the sight of him when he had been chatting animatedly with the waitress in his native tongue was probably the most relaxed you've ever seen him.

He offers you some, and you shake your head.

_"_ I wouldn't have chosen you. This. If I-- if I had a choice, I mean," you say, holding back a visceral, full-body flinch at how fragile your voice sounds. "I just-- you deserve to know that."

And--

You know the science, you know that you can't, by any logical means, actually _feel_ any of your soulmate's emotions, but you imagine for a second that your own mark burns with a bittersweet combination of sadness and _acceptance._ A sudden lurch of guilt tugs at your gut, pulling and twisting your stomach into knots, and you have to fight down the sudden desire to take the words back; you don't, of course, because it wouldn't be fair if you did. Wouldn't be _true._

"You are angry because of what I did," he says, matter-of-factly. He breaks off a piece of the pastry, and the cream-cheese and raspberry jam is stained pink against his fingers. His hands are never quite steady, you notice, and you wonder if that's just nerves or if it's a part of who he is now, a side effect of the experiments, his body never pausing long enough to be truly still. 

"I'm angry that you took the wrong side," you say, aiming for impassive but failing miserably. "I mean-- there's no reason for-- for someone to do something like that, to _willingly_ hurt people--"

"But you do the same thing," he points out, fixing you with a searching stare. "You hurt people, the same as we did. What makes you different?"

"Because we aren't the _bad guys,"_ you say, sharper and harder and _meaner_ than you had intended.

Pietro smiles-- it's not really happy, no, not even nice at all, more of a grimace than anything else, a twitch of his lips that doesn't have enough strength behind it to reach his eyes. "Neither were we," he whispers, voice uncharacteristically determined. "Not to us."

You blink slowly. The words make more sense than you'd like them to, settle cold in the pit of your stomach as you watch him, not saying anything. 

Pietro looks out the window again, and something in his eyes is distant and lost; it's an expression you've seen before, on Steve's face and on Clint's face and on Nat's, the look of someone who's seen too much from too young of an age to grow up anything other than perpetually on edge. Perpetually _angry._ He scrapes his fork across his empty plate, the metal making a sharp, discordant sound against the bright-white china. 

You take a small, pensive sip of your latte, biting down on the straw between your teeth.

"When I volunteered for the," he hesitates, "The _experiments._  All I wanted--"

Pietro trails off, something in his eyes going soft and still and _sad._

"I wanted to save people," he says, with more force than you'd expected. "I wanted--  I wanted the people that I loved to stop dying. I was tired of watching and doing nothing, and I thought--"

A realization dawns on you, and it's harsher and clearer and _brighter_ than it should have been, than you expected or wanted it to be, the pang of hollow understanding in your stomach fierce and sudden. 

"You thought you were doing the right thing," you finish for him. 

"Yes." Pietro relaxes, the line of his shoulders and the subtle ticking tightness in the muscles of his jaw dissolving. "You understand."

"Yeah," you say, softly, uncertainly, "Yeah, I do."

It isn't much, but it's a start.

 

* * *

 

It gets easier, after that. 

Something fundamental in you and Pietro's understanding of each other-- because you _still_ refuse to label it a relationship-- changes.

You still sort of don't really want him around and he's still annoyingly devoted and annoyingly attractive and just, like-- generally flawless to the point of it being irritating, but--

It's not as bad as before. 

It's--

It's a _compromise._

 

* * *

 

Pietro has never seen the ocean.

It's a comment he makes in passing, perched on the very edge of your bed-- he'd been talking animatedly about all the sights in New York City, smiling over the view of Central Park from the Empire State Building, how he'd seen the sliver of blue from the harbor in the distance-- and something about it had struck you as just so incredibly fucking _sad_.

You take the train down to Montauk on Long Island Sound on a whim.

Technically, you're not supposed to be going very far from the compound, not while you're still as weak as you are, but you'd sat there propped up against a stack of pillows and you'd listened to him explain how he used to tell Wanda stories of what it must be like at the coast,  how it was something he held onto even when he was starving or homeless or on the verge of death, and--

And you feel your gut wrench with the weight of something that you can't or just flat-out don't want to put a name to, settling heavy in your stomach like a cold stone. 

You get on a train four days later without really telling him much about your destination. It's three-and-a-half hours from Penn Station all the way down to the very end of Long Island, and you spend the time talking, sitting opposite him in the cramped train compartment with your feet kicked up on the sticky faux-leather upholstery. 

You learn a lot about him in those three hours.

 He's twenty-three. His favorite color is blue. His favorite food is the _latkes_ his mother used to make every year around Hanukkah, he has a waxy pink sliver of a scar on his knee from tripping down the stairs when he was six years old, he had broken his nose when he was twelve, gotten punched by a shady mercenary at the front of a protest line and it had never quite healed the same. You wonder, idly, if you were to get close enough, if you would be able to tell.

There are things that you learn from him that he doesn't tell you, too-- like the way that he sounds when he laughs, like the sound had been punched out of him, throaty and helpless, how he smiles and how it's always crooked and bright and painfully genuine. 

As the train hurtles closer to the coastline, Pietro's saying something too quickly for you to really follow along with; he does this a lot, you've noticed, his brain consistently moving faster than his words can keep up, and in anyone else it might have been an annoying quality. You refuse to examine why it's endearing when it comes from him.

You can pinpoint the exact moment in which the ocean becomes visible past the harbor and the scraggly collection of buildings lining the tracks, a steady streak of blue against the horizon. You don't really think that the Sound is anything particularly special on a good day, filled with tourists and drying seaweed and particularly vicious seagulls all burning up under the blistering sun, so on a rainy day in mid-September it's just kind of  _dull,_ washed out in empty shades of gray and green and pale, pasty blue-- 

Pietro is stunned into silence anyway.

Whatever he had been saying drifts off, words stumbling and stuttering into silence, and you watch his face soften and brighten and open up like a flower turning towards the sun, and it's stupid and it's meaningless and you _know that,_ but he looks-- happy. He looks like he's a kid again and you find yourself wishing that you had a camera just so that you had some way to capture the expression on his face, to memorize it and preserve it and _keep_ it.

You leave the train at the station in Montauk, walk under the protection of a worn, navy-blue umbrella across a mostly empty boardwalk; the cold rain had made the ground steam up and the beach looks almost eerie in the resulting fog. You buy cheap, shitty food from one of the stands and make your way to a bench with a view of the beach dunes and the ocean expanding off into the distance, because you're still weak and can't really walk for long periods of time.

You keep talking.

The conversation turns less trivial. You talk about your childhoods and adulthoods-thus-far, about the past and the present and not at all about your respective futures.

"What was your family like, when you were younger?" You ask, angling the umbrella over your heads to block out the slight mist still coming down.

"My parents died when I was very young," he says matter-of-factly, with the ease and the distance of someone who has had a long, _long_  time to come to terms with the fact. "My mother was Rromani and my father was Jewish. I take after him. He was an activist, and a rabbi, before he--" Pietro trails off with a shrug.

You hesitate, fiddling with a loose thread on the inside of your shirt sleeve-- you wind it round and round your finger, pulling tighter until the fabric dimples and wrinkles and folds, until the thread breaks and unwinds itself sluggishly. 

"When I was in Sokovia, I used to steal goods for the people there," he says, unprompted. "Wanda didn't want me to. She wanted me to go by the rules. Our father used to tell us that when people are suffering and the ones in power do nothing about it, rules stop mattering."

Out of the corner of your eye, you can tell that he's looking at you, eyes bright robin's-egg blue and just as piercing as always; like he can see through you and into your head and like he's carding through all the thoughts that you haven't said out loud.

"He would have liked you," he decides.

You blink. Surprise isn't really the right word to describe what you're feeling; not exactly, but it's close. "Thank you."

"It's the truth." He clears his throat, eyes flickering pack to the stormy swell of the ocean in front of you. The crash of waves against the rocky shore is loud and rhythmic in the sudden, oddly comfortable silence. "What about your family?"

You manage a dry laugh at the question, the sound coming out as mostly a snort. In front of the bench, a curious seagull has been inching closer and closer for the last few minutes, and you meticulously tear the edge off of your shitty boardwalk-stand sandwich, flicking the piece of plain white bread in it's general direction.

"My family is-- complicated," you say, after a minute. You're not used to talking about yourself, not in any real degree, and the words come out shaky and stilted. "The jury is currently still out on whether or not my, uh, _certain skills_ are a gift from God or from Satan, so everything's kind of weird. And also, just. Family is weird anyways, you know?"

Pietro laughs, again, and nods, the movement too-quick and jerky. "Yes."

"I don't think anybody else knows," you say abruptly, changing the subject. "About your parents, I mean. Pretty sure the rest of the team thinks Wanda is just Sokovian."

"That is--- not surprising," he says dryly, staring out into the gray expanse of the ocean, churning rapids and white-capped waves. "I am much more political than my sister. She forgets where she came from. She forgets her--" he searches for the word for a handful of seconds, "Her roots."

A pause settles, heavy and expectant, before he speaks again.

"I don't blame her," Pietro continues. His voice has taken on a much softer quality to it, like he's telling you something important. "It is easier for her, this way. She just wants to be happy."

You lick your lips, measuring your next words before saying them, "And what do _you_ want?"

Pietro sighs. He runs his hand through his hair. If he had looked his age on the train, smiling out at the expanse of the ocean for the first time, he looks older, now. Like he's seen too much.

"I want to be free," he confesses. "I don't want to have to hide _anything_."

You wonder if it means something that a part of you had known what his answer would be, before he'd said it. If it was luck, or if it was something deeper, like fate or like destiny or like--

You don't know, actually, what it is or what it could be, and it's _scary._

It's starting to make more sense, you think, why he's your soulmate.

 

* * *

 

Clint, predictably, is the one who has to call you on your bullshit.

He stops you in the communal kitchen at 9:57 in the morning, sliding in between you and the industrial fridge, blocking the door with his arm. You stand there for a moment too long, clutching a misshapen cardboard quart of milk and an empty cereal bowl, still half-asleep and entirely nonplussed. 

"Can I help you?"

"Yeah," he says, a stupid little know-it-all smile twitching at his mouth. "Can we talk?"

"Depends," you reply, forcibly shoving him out of your way so that you can actually put the milk away. The fridge closes with a click of rubber insulation against metal, and you turn to fix him with a curious stare. "Can you make it quick? Like, _within-the-next-ten-minutes-_ quick, because Pietro and I are going to see _The Lion King_ on broadwayin like, an hour, and the traffic is going to _suck--"  
_

"His idea or yours?"

You blink, and answer slowly, uncertain as to where the conversation is going. "Mine. Why?"

Clint grins, then, leaning back against the blue-tiled kitchen island, arms folded over his chest. "Because I was _right._ It _is_ working out, and you're falling for him, and I'm the best."

You open your mouth, and then you close it again, and then you open it, _again--_

"I'm pretty sure you're wrong about a good two-thirds of what you just said, but, I mean, okay. Whatever you want."

Internally, you're proud at how steady your voice is, sarcasm heavy and evident, a veritable shield against-- whatever stupid bullshit he's implying. Because that's all it is, you think, with more anxiety than you probably should be feeling considering it was nothing more than a baseless accusation.

Still, though.

"I'm not _in love with him_ ," you say into the silence, incredulous and fairly certain that it's the truth.

"Okay, that's not what I said, though," Clint retorts, moving around the kitchen island to grab a banana off of the bunch shoved between the microwave and the fancy, state-of-the-art latte machine. "I said you were falling for him. Like. Not in love, yet, but definitely getting there."

You try to think of an equally witty response to that, but find yourself coming up short and a little bit lost, honestly, because--

Because there's something catching in your throat, some unidentifiable emotion fluttering like butterflies somewhere around your voice box, and you can't quite seem to catch it and hold it still long enough to determine what, exactly, the feeling is, only that it blocks out whatever words you'd been trying to say and renders you silent. Contemplative. _Confused._

The real issue, you think, is that Pietro is your soulmate. The only one you're ever going to get, whether you liked it or wanted it or-- not. So there's a level of objectivity that's definitely lacking in your relationship. There's a level of unspoken closeness and wordless understanding between the two of you that you don't think you'd ever be able to find anywhere else, and it makes it hard to consider what Clint's saying because it's hard to tell, even now, what part of you likes Pietro because you're supposed to, and what part likes him because you just _do._

But--

There were events, fractured series of interactions between the two of you, that if you lined them up one-after-another made you wonder if maybe--

You'd come home with a pastel-blue bakery box full of _kolaczki_ from the pastry shop he'd first taken you to on a day you could tell he was feeling especially homesick. And you had wordlessly bought those stupid little baby-proof foam guards at the drug store to cover the sharp edges of literally all the kitchen counters for the days when he couldn't slow down enough to avoid bumping into them. You had listened to him talk about his nightmares and his traumas the same way he listens to you talk about yours, and somewhere along the way you had stopped blaming him for it. For anything, really.

"Oof," you say, out loud, with a grimace and with _feeling._

Clint's answering grin is cocky and self-congratulatory and fucking _annoying._

 

* * *

 

You go to see _Lion King._

And--

It's good, yeah, but you're not really focused on that. 

When you leave, it's with a mass of other people, all pushing and shoving each other; the heat and the closeness of the crowd makes you dizzy, has you swaying listlessly on your feet and in imminent danger of passing out or something equally as shitty. Pietro notices, because he notices everything, and before you can muster up the courage to say something, he places a hand just gently on the small of your back-- like he's afraid you won't want him to touch you, even as brief and as meaningless as this-- and guides you away from the crowd. 

"We can sit for a while," he says, smiling, as you collapse against a particularly inviting wall, near to where the merchandise counter is set up, overflowing with keepsake cups and key-chains and posters and a collection of ostensibly very expensive signed t-shirts.

"Thank you," you say, the words sounding far-away and distorted as your vision slowly stops swimming. "Did you like the show?"

His smile is bright and slightly blurry. "I did."

The two of you sit like that for a moment, until the crowd has mostly drifted out onto the street, and there's only the two of you and a handful of stragglers left.

"Are you okay to go?" he asks, pushing himself up to his feet. 

You grimace, forcing yourself into a more upright sitting position. "I think so."

He holds his hand out to help you up, then, and you take it, allowing him to pull you to your feet, and what you do next is kind of instinctive but also, like, _not_ , because you'd spent almost the entirety of the play working up the courage to do what you're about to do--

You don't let go of his hand.

He looks at you, for a second, confused, probably, uncertain, _definitely_ \--

You lace your fingers with his.

"Just to be safe," you say, voice barely more than a whisper. "So I don't fall."

Pietro hesitates for a second, and then a smile curls up and across his face, slanted and cocky and _sure._ "Yeah?"

You smile at him-- _really_ smile, happy and a little bit nervous-- and resolutely don't overthink the lazy stutter of your pulse, the tightening in your gut in response that you've always associated with a particular sort of anticipation, with the high-school kind of uncertainty, when all of this was new and exciting.

You squeeze his hand. 

"Yeah."

 

* * *

 

You kiss him for the first time as he's reading off one of the educational placards at the Metropolitan Museum of art, standing in front of a roman-era sculpture of Venus that's inexplicably missing both arms, and--

And he smiles into it, the pearly white flash of his teeth flickering and disappearing and when you pull back he looks sort of-- bemused, like he's not quite sure what just happened or why, but still happy. Content.

It feels right.

You kiss him in a lot of places after that-- on the boat to the Statue of Liberty tour, on Ellis Island, in a collection of quaint cafes in the downtown part of the city. And he kisses you in the dark of a dim movie theater waiting for the new _Star Wars_ and in the empty common room at Stark Tower, in the fucking _Whole Foods_ at the corner of 57th.

And each time-- every time-- he smiles, glancing over at you with a wistful sort of fondness that you register somewhere in your chest, feel as it pulses and skitters and takes up residence somewhere in your chest. You should be getting used to it, by now. 

You're glad that you aren't. 

The day that it changes into something deeper-- to something _more--_ is the day that he explains to you why his mark has a scar across it, thick and waxy, dividing it neatly in half. You're lying across your king-size bed in your room in Stark Tower, and you're fiddling with the linen seam of your pillowcase, half-watching the TV and listening to the soothing familiar sounds of his accent as he talks.

Pietro tells you that during the experiments they had considered removing his mark entirely. Had settled, apparently, for splitting it in two. That it was supposed to keep him focused, to remove any last vestiges of humanity from him, to make him into more of a soldier. 

You lurch upright, into a sitting position, and you look over at him-- his expression is calm, like he doesn't really care and can't quite muster up any sort of emotion towards what he just said, but you still feel sadness gathering in your stomach, salty like tears or like seawater--

"Don't look at me like that," he says.

He kisses you then, too, probably so that he doesn't have to examine your expression in any more detail, and as he cups your jaw and his fingers are drumming that same too-fast rhythm against the back of your neck. The pressure of his touch against your mark feels suspiciously like the beginning of something, the anticipation inside your chest pulling at strings you hadn't even known were there. Exposing you to something you hadn't even known how to want.

"Pietro," you whisper, at the same time that he says "Shh."

It's different, after that.

He slides his hands up under your shirt, urges you closer to him so gently that it's more of a suggestion than anything else; emphasizing that he isn't forcing you to move and when you lean into his touch it's your own doing. His hands are lightly calloused, rough and warm against your skin, and when he kisses you again the tone of it has changed, the way his tongue swipes across your bottom lip is teasing, _testing,_ and his answering sigh when your mouth parts under his is-- satisfied. _Happy._

You kiss him harder and Pietro makes a muffled sound that echoes somewhere in his chest; his hands move further up underneath your shirt, thumb stroking hesitantly over the padded wire edge of your bra. You pull away from him to peel your shirt off and he looks at you the way you think he's supposed to, the same way you probably look at him.

You wonder if you love him. If you don't now, you're certain that you will.

"What are you doing?" he mumbles, words slurred against your skin, mouth pressed to where your neck meets your shoulder as he kisses down the column of your throat. 

"What do you think I'm doing?"

His answering laugh is sly, the smirk that curls across his face slow and teasing and genuine. "You think you're strong enough, now?"

"I think we'll find out," you reply, softer, tugging him in by the shirt collar.

Pietro pulls his own shirt off and you press your mouth to the center of his chest. He fumbles with the clasp on your bra and it takes him one--two-- _three_ tries to work it open, and you'd laugh if not for the way that his hands are almost immediately on you, hot and heavy against the curve of your waist, sliding up the expanse of your bare skin. His mouth slants over yours, tongue curling up and over your teeth as he unzips your shorts and flattens the curve of his palm over your underwear and _fuck_ there's a shock of awareness that thrums through your body at the touch, a sudden too-bright live wire feeling that hits you so hard you're almost _literally_ dizzy with it--

You wonder if you're moving too quickly, and then your shorts are somewhere on the side of the bed his fingers are brushing against your clit through a thin layer of lace and cotton and it doesn't matter anymore. 

He unbuttons his jeans and kicks them down past his knees and you pull off your underwear and your pulse trembles, flutters, tremulous and uncertain as he moves up your body-- but then his hands are back on your waist and the upper part of your thighs and the warmth of them seeps into your skin and it feels right in a way that you can't explain, makes everything else seem small and insignificant in comparison. 

He pushes into you with one long thrust. 

You can feel the heat inside of you,  can feel it rising up, traveling through you, and you pull him closer, wanting to get your hands on as much of that warmth as possible as your hips roll against his. It would be so easy to close your eyes and get lost in it, in the weight of his body between your spread thighs and the bruise of his hips pressed into you and the soft and breathless sounds of your name in his mouth. But you don't-- you focus in on him, on the layer of sweat that beads up between your breasts at how close he's pressed into you, creating a cocoon of heat with his body, and everything in that moment is excruciatingly and wonderfully _real._  His fingers are slightly clumsy as they drift down to your clit and the friction makes you shudder and gasp out a quiet moan and when you come, it isn't quick, it's slow and lazy like a ripple or a wave or something that builds on itself before crashing and cresting and tapering off into a fine, needlepoint edge---

He finishes not soon after you, presses a kiss to the corner of your mouth as his breath stumbles and stalls and his head dips against your shoulder. 

A long, intimate moment passes before he moves, off and over, lies next to you on the bed, trying to catch his breath. The silence that has descended is comfortable and warm and _yours,_ you think, as you take the perfectly-sized space under his arm.

You don't speak, not then, but he does.

"You said once that you wouldn't have chosen me," he hedges, and it isn't a question but it still somehow kind of is.

You hesitate for a long moment before replying, before reaching out to take his hand and marveling at how easily--how nicely-- how _perfectly_ your fingers lace together. "People don't usually choose the things that are right for them," you answer.

Pietro's answering chuckle is soft in the silence, and his smile-- his smile is full and bright and blinding and you wouldn't have traded it for the world.

 


End file.
